Prayer is a Great Help

John Rice defined an answer to the question: "What is prayer?" in the title of his classic book, Prayer: Questions and Receiving. Richard Foster offered a different answer to the question with his book, Prayer: finding the true home of the heart. So is prayer the act by which we receive things from God? Is this the way to join God? Or something in between?

I do not think you can answer the question philosophically because for some Christians prayer is really that of obtaining things from God, be they material goods or miracles. For other Christians, according to the terminology of Mother Teresa, "God loves me". What prayer is philosophically very dependent on how much we have progressed in our spiritual growth and what God wants to achieve in us at this moment.

However, when we think together with the function of prayer, we can at least find some kind of answer. When Jesus spoke of life in the kingdom of heaven, much of his description was given to the people we would become: what we would be. In the kingdom of heaven we will be people who love our neighbor as ourselves, we will be people who are aware of the depth of our sin and who are familiar with God's forgiveness, so that we must forgive ourselves and not project our judgments one over 'other, Pablo tells us that we will be people who always protect, always trust, always wait and always resist. We will be people who will love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

Would not it be great if you came to church and said that everyone in the church did all the work to become that kind of person? If you could assume that your Christian brothers not only knew the basic doctrine but also lived them? Does not this affect the way your board works, assuming everyone on the board loves their enemies and turns the other cheek? And would not it be great if everyone in the church accepted that you did the job and that you really love them as yourself?

Musicians talk about going to the stake. The metaphorical pyre is where they are practiced, where hammering fingering and sounds; There they work in difficult places until they can touch them well. The musicians go to the stake to master their scales and arpeggios, and for jazz musicians they dominate the standard repertoire, allowing them to talk musically with other musicians. In the jazz world, we invite you to sit down until you spend your time at the stake.

Tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Lester "Prez" Young played with a drummer who had not taken the time, had not spent enough time at the stake. Among the phrases that drummer Jung tried to amuse: "Say, Prez, when we worked together for the last time?"

"Tonight," Lester replied.

Prayer works for us as our stake. Prayer is the place where we begin to elaborate all the mechanisms and details of life in Jesus. We begin to pray and ask for something. That's where we all start, it's like learning ladders. We ask for things and sometimes we get what we ask for, sometimes no. We start looking for patterns, regardless of the fact that what we do makes a difference in God's response. This puts us on the path of asking what it means to pray in the name of Jesus.
This brings us to more prayer, more rot, more practice to become more like Jesus and ask for things in his character. We begin to act outside the character of Jesus and not ours. This means that we begin to participate in the suffering of Jesus, which brings us back to the stake.

So let's begin to understand in prayer what it takes to interact with the God we can not see, taste, touch or listen to. We begin to develop the ability to look into the heart of another, in this case, the heart of God. We begin to express the heart of God by interacting with each other. We begin to see the hearts of others and see Jesus in them.

And then back in the pyre, where we begin to see our heart. We come to an agreement with our only sin and structure in our lives. Let's start seeing our dark side, our shadow, and watch how God does it, with compassionate eyes. We recognize who we are in our deepest abyss. We begin to forgive and accept ourselves. And it allows us to deal more easily with other people around us.

You can say other things about what prayer is. We talk to God, we listen and sometimes we listen to God. We sit in the presence of God and sometimes he appears and we have fun. We can describe prayer as the path to our mystical union with God. But, basically, prayer is our place of practice. First of all, prayer is our stake. Prayer allows us to improvise our lives together in Jesus, to live our lives in communion with other Christians who pray and who are experts in the basics.

So, what is prayer?

Prayer is an opportunity to do the work necessary to participate in the great impromptu session that creates the Kingdom of God here below.